Walls of Babylon

The walls of Babylon were the city walls around the ancient Mesopotamian city of Babylon. This city was very important for the Neo-Babylonian Empire. The big walls helped protect the city and showed how strong it was.

The walls of Babylon were listed in early versions of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. A study by Wilhelm Heinrich Roscher showed that people picked these walls as the second-best wonder, after only the Colossus of Rhodes. Ancient writers like Herodotus, Strabo, and the author of the Book of Jeremiah all wrote about these amazing buildings.

These walls were the biggest buildings in Babylon. A German team led by Robert Koldewey thought the walls were between 12 and 24 meters high and 17 to 22 meters thick. Today, people can still see parts of Babylon because the city walls remain as earthworks, even before modern digging started in 1899.

Ancient descriptions

The ancient historian Herodotus described the walls of Babylon in his book Histories. He said the walls were very big. They formed a square about 22 kilometers on each side. They were about 24 meters thick and 97 meters tall, made from baked brick.

Other writers like Strabo, Diodorus Siculus, and Quintus Curtius Rufus also wrote about these huge walls. The Bible also mentions the walls.

History

The walls of Babylon were built a long time ago, in the early second millennium BC. Ancient writings from the time of Hammurabi and his family talk about building city walls, gates, and moats.

Later, in the mid-first millennium BC, a king named Nabopolassar built two big walls called Imgur-Enlil and Nēmet-Enlil. His son, Nebuchadnezzar II, made the walls even bigger. The inner wall, Imgur-Enlil, was made of strong baked bricks. The outer wall, Nēmet-Enlil, was a huge mudbrick rampart. A deep moat, filled with water from the Euphrates river, was built between the two walls to protect the city.

Archaeology, current status and reconstruction

The first careful excavations of Babylon’s walls were done by German archaeologist Robert Koldewey from 1899 to 1917. He dug deep into parts of the walls and mapped others. Later, Iraqi teams studied the Ishtar Gate and nearby walls, adding repairs and reconstructions.

Today, many parts of the walls are still visible, though some have been damaged by modern building. In Berlin, the Pergamon Museum shows copies of the Ishtar Gate and parts of the road leading to it, made from original pieces and newer bricks. In Babylon itself, large reconstructions were done in the late 1970s and early 1980s, including parts of the city wall and gates, using strong baked bricks in some places.